A researcher who nearly dropped his PhD in the self-driving boom is glad he didn't
chris_j_paxton · x · 2026-08-19
Robotics researcher Chris Paxton shares that during the big self-driving boom of the 2010s he seriously considered leaving his PhD for industry — and is now "very glad" he did not, offering it as "just a data point."
The quoted tweet he replies to describes a top-5 researcher the poster has worked with — background in optimization and interpretability, fresh off an Apple MLR internship with glowing recs — now exploring dropping out for industry, and offers intros to teams hiring for research roles with publishing scope.
More from Companies & People
- Joseph Jacks: 'Tokens Per Unit of Work' Is a Worse Metric Than Lines of Code — JosephJacks_ · 2026-08-19
- Frontier AI governance researcher feels lonely, suggests meetup — S_OhEigeartaigh · 2026-08-19
- AWS AI League returns: fine-tune a foundation model in 72 hours, deploy it as an agent, win a trip to re:Invent — ruchi798 · 2026-08-19
- a16z to host SF/LA Tech Week with Anthropic, Google, and others — andrewchen · 2026-08-19
- ElevenLabs Growth Lead Carles Reina Joins Hilbert AI — kirbyman01 · 2026-08-19
- YC-backed AgentMail provides dedicated email inboxes for AI agents — ycombinator · 2026-08-19